Tonight's Awful Bedtime Movie: Attack Of The Eye Creatures (1965)

It's what it sounds like. Aliens made of eyeballs. And it's a 1965 remake from American International Pictures, of a 1962 AIP TV movie, so you know it's doubly low budget and sloppy.

Long story short. Eyeball-covered aliens invade backwoods town one night. The eyeball-covered aliens kill people. Teens uncover the evil goings-on. Fussy authority figures don't believe them, and blame them for the deaths. Teens save the town by turning their car headlights on the monsters, which causes them to explode.

I should say two long stories short. The military has been tracking the aliens and his on to everything. They surround the saucer, but in the end the teens stop the aliens. I have no idea why the entire military plot was even needed.

It's even dumber and more agonizing to watch than it sounds.

For one, if light causes the eyeball aliens to explode then the entire invasion will be wiped out in the morning. They'd be the first movie villains stopped by planetary rotation. And for a race of beings advanced enough to master intergalactic travel, why are they stupid enough to invade a planet they can only stay on for 10 hours?

There's more stinktitude.

The filmmakers didn't have the money to give every "alien" a full costume, so some of the eyeball-covered aliens have eyeball-covered bodies and others are just wearing black sweaters.

The movie takes place at night, but many of the scenes are shot in broad daylight with no effort to even pretend it's night.

Oh, and the movie was originally produced the title card read "The Eye Creatures." When B-movies are re-released, the title is often changed by adding, in this case "Attack Of." Unfortunately the editor had ADD because he pasted "Attack Of The" to the top of the title card.

Hence, we are informed we are watching "Attack Of The The Eye Creatures."

I hate you, movie.

Here's what I'm wondering.

Fun Facts:

The movie stinks, but it does have one star. Peter Graves has an uncredited role as the narrator in the opening scenes.

The film's budget was a whopping $16,000.

The film was directed by AIP mainstay Larry Buchanan as a color remake of an old black-and-white AIP film, intended for TV broadcast. According to Buchanan, AIP told him "We want cheap color pictures, we want half-assed names in them, we want them eighty minutes long and we want them now."

When Buchanan died in 2004, The New York Times eulogized him by writing, "One quality united Mr. Buchanan's diverse output: It was not so much that his films were bad; they were deeply, dazzlingly, unrepentantly bad. His work called to mind a famous line from H. L. Mencken, who, describing President Warren G. Harding's prose, said, 'It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it.'"